Car Crime Watch

We find out how the security experts at Thatcham have stayed a step ahead as car thieves move from brute force to hi-tech hacking.

- Joe Finnerty

A SCREWDRIVER, hammer and brute force – that was all you needed to smash your way into a car and drive off with it 25 years ago. It was so quick and easy that thieves embarked on a car crime wave that saw 620,000 vehicle thefts and one million thefts from inside cars and vans on UK roads in 1992 alone.

But vehicle manufacturers and insurers vowed that enough was enough, and fought back, creating new vehicle security standards to stop thieves in their tracks. The continually evolving system to tackle criminal tactics over the past quarter of a century has helped bring car crime down by 80 per cent. In 2015, there were just 75,000 vehicle thefts and 200,000 thefts from motors.

The fight isn’t over yet, though, because new threats are constantly emerging. The CV of the modern car thief has changed and their armoury has been upgraded. No longer do they force entry with heavy-duty tools; instead, they use a laptop, software and computer wizardry.

The industry is facing these challenges head on, and at the forefront of this is Thatcham Research. Based in Berkshire, it’s a global leader in this field, having set up its security team in 1992 and developed the New Vehicle Safety Assessment (NVSA) structure, rating new cars in the UK market to help inform insurance groups.

Radical

The idea was so radical that Thatcham and its partners battled some countries in the EU, such as Germany, to include this test in their ratings, but over time, NVSA was accepted as vital. Now the standard drives global product development of security, and the UK’s processes have been rolled out as far afield as Asia and Australia.

These days, Thatcham’s engineers travel the world to analyse the latest methods and techniques used by thieves, too. This information can then be fed back into the NVSA guidelines to create new criteria, close weak spots in vehicles and try to stay ahead of crooks.